Former U.S. Naval Ensign Leon Cooper remembers that seventy-six-hour period as if it were yesterday. “I still have nightmares from to time,” says the 89-year-old. “A random smell reminds me of the stink of that time. A sudden loud noise makes me jump.”

But with the landscape of Tarawa, the capital of the nation’s collection of coral atolls that are spread over 1,351,000 square miles of ocean, now largely a rubbish pit, Cooper set his demons aside and returned, in February 2008.

“I decided the only way I could get the garbage removed from Red Beach, the hallowed ground where so many of my countrymen died, was by filming the outrage,” he explains of the condition of the main landing beach for U.S. Marines.

The result is “Return to Tarawa: The Leon Cooper Story,” a forty-seven-minute documentary in which he recounts his harrowing experience six decades ago and his current quest to properly honor his fallen comrades.

In the film, which is hosted by actor Ed Harris, Cooper expresses his anger at the U.S. government for ignoring the fact that Tarawa’s shores are cluttered with mounds of plastic bags, aluminum cans, and diapers — a grave insult to those who died serving their country, he believes. “I hope I can shame our dumb government into doing something about it.”

Tarawa is a narrow, low-lying strip of coral, located roughly 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii, that wraps around a lagoon. A lack of natural resources requires locals to rely on packaged foods, whose wrappings cannot be disposed of properly due the country’s small geographical size.

Though waste management programs have begun, Kiribati officials are hard-pressed to make substantial changes. “At the moment, people litter everywhere — on the beach and from vehicles,” says Noketi Karoua, assistant pollution control officer at the Ministry of Environment, Lands & Agricultural Development, whose division is now employing pilot projects that attempt to alter the public’s perception about the appropriate disposal of inorganic waste. “Before and until now, most people didn’t know how to manage inorganic waste.”

Yet to Cooper, even more shocking was his realization that numerous U.S. remains have not been repatriated. “Return to Tarawa” explains that following the battle the corpses of over one hundred Americans were deposited in unmarked graves. Cooper believes the basis of the problem exists with the U.S. Government’s policy of returning the remains of fallen soldiers in the most recent wars first, a procedure that relegates WWII to a lesser priority.

“It is essential that the Department of Defense make its policies known to the American public and then undertake an accelerated recovery rate of the WWII MIAs,” he says. “Absent the Department’s disclosure, Congress should begin a formal inquiry into this matter. Only in that way can the relatives of the WWII MIAs ever obtain closure.”

Larry Greer, a representative within the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office of the Department of Defense admits that the U.S. Government did once have an unofficial “most recent conflict first” policy in place. “But in recent years that has been changed to ‘all conflicts are equal,’ meaning that no one conflict has priority over another in terms of our applying U.S. government efforts toward recovering and identifying remains,” he says.

Greer explains that Tarawa is an especially challenging case, reporting that there are 500 Americans and 3,000 Japanese still missing. “So if there are initial indications that unidentified remains have been discovered, one must recognize that there is a high probability that they will ultimately be identified as Japanese,” he explains, adding that hundreds of Marines were killed in waist-deep water, a fact that further complicates retrieval. “Their bodies were floating around in the shallow surf, and some of the U.S. aircraft pilots reported that many of these were seen floating out to sea. But who were they? For those bodies which were recovered from the surf, the precise location of each and every burial is definitely not known.”

The fighting was centered on Betio, which is a half-square-mile strip of land that forms the western end of Tarawa. The Japanese troops arrived in late 1942. The island was subsequently converted into a fortress. Korean and local labor hacked tree trunks and assembled the logs into stockades. Large coastal guns, capable of firing 8-inch shells, were mounted along the beaches, which were further protected with coils of barbed wire, mines, and barricades of steel protruding from concrete mounts set in shallow water.

American battleships and destroyers started their assault on the morning of November 20, 1943. Later that same day, Marines riding tracked vehicles and landing crafts began the ten-mile charge towards the beach. But the Marines had underestimated the strength of the Japanese fortifications. The morning’s low tide also caused some of the low-draft crafts to be trapped on the reef off the lagoon.

Cooper was responsible for 15 of these boats. “A colossal miscall of the tides gave the Japanese gunners the proverbial ‘sitting duck’ targets as dozens of boats were perched helplessly on the reefs that ringed the island,” remembers Cooper. “I still don’t know which of the Red Beaches we landed on — there was so much smoke and fire enveloping the island, hiding it. I simply headed my boat group toward any beach, relieved that I was able to get to the ‘sand’ at all.”

Weighed down with heavy equipment, some Marines drowned after attempting to wade ashore. Japanese machine-gun fire caught others.

But eventually a Japanese line of defense was broken during that first day. After more positions were secured in the following hours, tanks and other heavy equipment were moved ashore. Flame throwers set the Japanese stockades ablaze.

American victory was symbolically secured on November 23rd, at noon, when a Navy airplane was able to touch down on the airstrip.

Casualties on both sides were heavy. The Americans lost over 1,000 troops, and the Japanese nearly 5,000, with many of the bodies cluttered on the beaches or, as Greer noted, lost at sea.

Today many war relics linger, crumbling on the white sands. Pieces of a B-24 Liberator bomber sit in the lagoon, some of the Japanese coastal guns still point out to sea, and various concrete bunkers are being used by the locals for housing.

For Cooper, the battle rages on. He has spent over $100,000 of his own money on the implementation of “Action Program for Tarawa,” which he hopes will benefit the health and well-being of the people of Kiribati and make for a model to be followed by the rest of the Pacific in “restoring the beauty of the ocean and reversing the destruction of marine life.” The two-phase waste management project includes the provision of waste containers, a disposal education program, and the supply of an incinerator.

“Red Beach would once again become a pristine area,” he says, “a permanent memorial to those who fought and died there.”

Note: This article originally appeared in the autumn 2009 issue of Tokyo Journal.

“I fill this up with coconut oil – $2 a gallon,” he says, producing a spray bottle of light brown liquid from beneath the driver’s seat. “It helps to clean the inside of my car. I just wipe it down.” He then pats the dashboard just below the yellow fuzzy dice dangling from his rear view mirror.

Adding a little sparkle to a car’s interior is just one of the many uses for products coming from the coconut – its dried meat, or copra, has been a major source of income for many resource-poor nations in the Pacific over the last two centuries.

With the Marshall Islands being a collection of tiny coral atolls, revenue is left to only a few options: a small number of tourists come to dive at Bikini Atoll; fresh fish is exported; international assistance is received from Japan, the U.S., and China; and there is copra.

In spite of the copra market hitting upon tough times in recent decades, the Tobolar Copra Processing Plant is still going strong, hoping to put a little glimmer back on the commodity that was once known as “king copra” in the Pacific.

“There is nothing else,” says Jerry Kramer, the CEO of Pacific International, Inc (PII), the company that holds the contract with the Government of the Marshall Islands to manage the Tobolar plant. The facility is a quasi-government operation that handles the purchasing of the copra, the management of the employees, the product sales, and anything else involved in running the business.

The actual processing of copra into its main marketable products – coconut oil and “copra cake” – is simple. The raw meat arrives by ship from the plantations in the outer islands and is stored in the plant’s large warehouse. At this point, the copra is white, but its outer skin is brown due to contact with the shell and from the fire used in the drying process by the pickers.

The copra is first ground and cooked. It is then fed into a large grinder (at Tobolar, this is a recently refurbished meat scrap machine). Here, it is placed under enough pressure in the machine’s central barrel that coconut oil “squirts out.”

The oil is then filtered before being stored in one of two 16,000-ton capacity tanks. What remains is copra cake – a perfect, high-protein animal feed for farmers in Australia and the U.S. Kramer says that the dairy cattle farmers like it because the residual oil increases butterfat content, making a head of cattle’s milk more valuable.

Coconut oil, which is priced at nearly three times (per pound) over the cake, is exported via oil tankers to the U.S. where it is used in the processing of food, alcohols, and cosmetics.

The Tabolar plant opened for business in 1979. It processes 5,000 tons of copra on average each year. But the Japanese showed during their occupation of the islands before World War II that the capacity of the Marshall Islands’ plantations is much more. “From these same islands before the war, the Japanese processed 30,000 to 33,000 tons of copra per year,” says Kramer. “It was a part of the war movement and there was a lot of forced labor to do it, a lot of whipping.”

One reason for the falloff is that the workers of today usually do not make more copra than they can store for the next arriving vessel. As a result, if there is a shipping problem (a common occurrence), nobody works. Further, operators tend to work mainly just before Christmas and summer, periods when money is needed and kids are out of school. Additionally, if the world demand for coconut oil is low, then production ceases entirely.

“Over the past year, the price was very low. A low price means there is no demand. As a result, we weren’t able to make a sale for close to 2 years. We had a full warehouse of copra, a full tank of oil, and we couldn’t run the machinery,” Kramer says, waving his right hand in the direction of the plant just one block from his office.

A full tank of coconut oil is a two-fold problem. In addition to a stagnating inventory, there is also the issue of the accumulation of free fatty acid, which increases over time and is an impurity that must be refined out of the oil before it can be consumed. Kramer’s motto for selling the oil has thus become: “The fresher the better.”

After the war, Marshall Islands’ producers shipped their copra to Japan and its one buyer, Fuji Oil. This relationship also meant one price, a lack of competition that eventually led to a change in how the product was sold internationally. “We decided that we could add value, produce some jobs, and come up with a product that we could market internationally by going into processing,” Kramer remembers of his reasoning for constructing the Tobolar plant in the late ’70s.

Then came the battle with the mighty soybean. “All the crap that the soybean people did was wrong,” Kramer says of a soybean industry public relations campaign from a few decades ago. The push highlighted studies which concluded that coconut oil raised cholesterol levels. Kramer remains a skeptic, maintaining that “coconut oil is perhaps the healthiest oil you can eat.”

Copra’s world market price slowly fell in the ’80s. It was taken off the U.S. commodity exchange and has yet to regain its luster from years past.

There was a time, however, when copra was a highly valued crop. “Copra was king,” Kramer says. “Pound-for-pound it was more valuable than rice.” And it is true that merchants in the South Pacific in the middle of 19th century traded extensively in the crop between ports.

Today, even with the market still not near what it once was, Tobolar charges on. Recent machinery changes have increased oil extraction yields and a small in-house refinery has been added that allows for the production of soap. Perfumes are added and the colors changed so that the soap can be marketed internationally. “Marshallese women use it as a post-natal treatment for wrinkles,” the CEO claims.

Kramer’s office is a jumble of activity. The phone rings every few minutes. Employees continually rush in asking for his signature or opinion concerning any one of the many businesses that PII operates. However, the heavy-set 40-year resident of the Marshall Islands remains largely unruffled in his Hawaiian shirt, large stacks of documents swallowing his desk. Price manipulation, however, is one subject that will cause him to rise from his chair.

The government sets the price that Tobolar must pay to the producers. Many times the rate is excessive relative to the copra’s worth, essentially becoming a subsidy. Since the capital Majuro is low on living space and resources, it is beneficial for Senators within the government to provide an incentive for people in the outer islands to stay there.

“The only thing they [the Senators] can do for their people is copra. So come election time, Tobolar gets screwed,” fumes Kramer, who sometimes pays the producers double what he can fetch on the international market. With this sort of assistance in place, he says that it is very difficult to produce better products for the future.

If given the chance, Kramer would put a lot of money back into the industry, investing in beasts of burden or motorized vehicles. As it is now, workers move their harvested copra with a bags slung over their backs. Even a simple wagon is very rare.

The old ways still march on, the CEO says rather glumly: “You know, husk on a stick, crack it with a machete, dig out the meat with your hand, and put it over a fire.” As Kramer speaks, he mimics each activity with his hands. He pauses and then adds, “There is only so much a man can do.”

Note: This article originally appeared in August 2002 on the Sake-Drenched Postcards Web page.

“Her husband has asked me to stop her from playing,” says Allan, the heavy-set 48-year-old manager of Club 21, as he signs the marker. “But this is a free country, and the customer is always right. She is one of my best customers. What can I do?”

Club 21 is one of the four slot clubs in Port Vila, a place where the everyday pace is traditionally a relaxed blend of palm fronds twisting in the morning breeze and drinking straws twisting in evening fruit drinks. Yet online casinos and standard Las Vegas-style parlors from international entrepreneurs are slowly moving onto Vanuatu’s shores, where they hope to shake a few coconuts from its trees. For a slot club manager like Allan, the prospect of this added competition is just one of the many things in his business that keeps him on his toes.

The club, a joint partnership between Australian and Japanese investors that is also responsible for a sister operation in Papua New Guinea, houses 66 standard Australian-imported slot and draw poker machines within its two dimly lit rooms. A large projection screen on the back wall of the main room pumps out the latest MTV hit videos to a mix of male and female patrons in shorts, sandals, and flower-patterned shirts. Some smoke and some drink as they play his machines, required by law to return 96% to the player. Some do all three.

But the club is not just a simple slot club where the players come in hopes of a jackpot. Along with trying to add one hot new machine each month, Allan’s promotions are one of the keys to his business. The club opens at 10 a.m. Patrons purchasing 1,000 vatu (roughly $10) worth of coins get a numbered ticket. One hour later, and continuing for most of the day, there is a drawing for prizes to target the wants of the type of clientele Allan expects to be in the club at any given time.

Housewives can be seen scooping up boxes of groceries and 25 kg bags of rice in the afternoon. Men get a chance to fill their stomachs with pizzas from the Italian restaurant next door for their lunch or dinner. Allan’s goal is to give the player an incentive to stay in the club at all times.

Then, in a late evening twist, it’s the guy’s turn to bring home the bacon, in the form of groceries and rice. Allan says of this latter strategy, “When the men go home at night, maybe they have no money, but they have groceries. Their family is happy.”

So far his plan seems to be working. Allan estimates that he has just over half of the slot market in Port Vila. This is a far cry from what the club was like before Allan took over as manager two years ago. “Let’s put it this way, it wasn’t a place to bring your girlfriend,” he chuckles of those days, a time when the club was rundown and frequented by mostly male thugs who were more concerned with swearing and drinking than playing slots. In short, it was more a bar than a club.

Allan changed that by upgrading the interior furnishings, outlawing swearing, throwing out the drunks, and throwing uniforms onto the security and floor staff. Since his start, he has improved business at the club by over 100 percent.

But Club 21 is not the only gambling operation that is making inroads in this island nation. Two years ago, the Government of Vanuatu passed an act that legalized online casinos. This has drawn interest from overseas. Kerry Packer, the Australian billionaire businessman and owner of the Crown Casino in Melbourne, began an online casino venture in Vanuatu earlier this year, ostensibly because the Australian government has banned this variation of gambling.

Legality, however, is just one of the draws of Vanuatu in the online arena. Annual licensing fees ($50,000) are half of that offered by rival online nation Antigua. Taxes (2.5%) are a half a percent less. Additional interest from big European players is signaling that more online parlors will be arriving on Vanuatu’s virtual shores shortly.

The seven-floor Grand Hotel and Casino – to be the largest structure in Vanuatu – is set to open in October on Port Vila’s bay, just down the street from Club 21. Rumors are swirling that an American-Indian group from the United States is planning on buying up a majority of the operation’s shares to secure controlling interest in the venture, which will feature casino games, a VIP section, and standard slot action.

“I am not worried,” Allan says of the encroaching competition. “The directors [of Club 21] were concerned. But my experience in the South Pacific, as marketing manager for Toyota for 23 years, I found that if you feel you have the right marketing as far as goals, amusements, and environment, you will be successful.”

Allan has no doubt that many of his customers, mainly local folks in their 30s and 40s, will initially try the new casino a few times. But since it is marketed to high rollers from overseas, he thinks they won’t feel comfortable. “They’ll come back,” he assures.

Rather than competition, theft by his employees is Allan’s biggest worry. A computer program – created by his machine supplier Aristocrat – along with various daily and weekly data allows him to spot machines that may be missing coins. With this information, he can back-check staff roster logs to see who was opening what machine at any given time. It allows him to see if any discrepancies repeatedly happen when a certain employee is on the job.

“The old saying goes ‘If you let them steal an egg today, they’ll steal the chicken tomorrow,’” Allan says. “We also have video cameras and the staff knows they are being monitored. It keeps them on their toes. But it doesn’t stop them completely. There is always temptation.”

The recent surge in gambling activity in Vanuatu is probably not what the legislators of Vanuatu’s original gambling code foresaw a decade ago when an act was passed. Prior to the passage of this measure, gambling was limited to that which took place in the small lounges for ex-servicemen during Vanuatu’s colonial period under the French and British. These were places where a husband and wife could come and have a snack, watch a film, shoot billiards, or play slots.

Even though the future seems bright for gambling in Vanuatu, recent government data does not bode well for the economy as a whole in the near-term.

Allan, not a player himself, concedes things appear bleak but he doesn’t foresee a drop in his business. “This is seen in every struggling country in the world,” he explains. “For people who are jobless or don’t have money, placing a bet on a horse or trying their luck in someway is seen as their last chance.”

Note: This article originally appeared in June 2002 on the Sake-Drenched Postcards Web page.

“Rolex?” questions a young, slender man in his thirties, tobacco-stained front teeth and hands moving through his outer jacket pockets.

It is an evening on the riverbank promenade of the Bund – Shanghai’s strip of historic art deco buildings aligned along the curve of the murky brown Huangpu River. Drink and film kiosks battle for customers busily snapping photos of the recently constructed towers and high-rises on the opposite bank. In between peddlers cruise the area in search of targets.

“Cheap, cheap,” he declares from underneath three layers of jackets, ostensibly necessary for the storing of his faux merchandise – his Rolexes, Breitlings, and Omegas, all shiny and attached to black plastic bands. The recommended Rolex rests in his palm. “Eighty yuan.”

When his price – the equivalent of around ten dollars – is turned down, he quickly counters with alternatives. “Ladies’ Rolex?” he asks, whipping out a smaller, more compact version of his initial offer as swiftly as a magician might produce a coin from between his fingers.

As the ante is upped with pens and wallets, an elderly woman with gray, frizzy hair approaches holding two watches with faces featuring a green-suited Chairman Mao in profile. She quickly elbows aside the younger vendor.

“Look, look,” she enthuses in her best raspy English as she begins winding one of the timepieces’ side wheels. As she does, the right arm of the Chairman’s caricature quickly pivots back and forth at the elbow in a waving motion and the red star-tipped seconds hand begins sweeping clockwise around a red sky backdrop.

When the Chairman’s arm inexplicably stops moving, she curses in her native Chinese language and momentarily hunches over, slapping its steel back with her index finger. By the time she straightens up with her again-waving Mao, her customer has lost all interest.

Such are the frustrations of capitalism.

“It’s all about money now,” says Xie You Yu, a 47-year old postal worker who works the riverbank in his part time selling personalized paper silhouettes. “Everyone is just trying to get money off people.”

Welcome to Shanghai, arguably Asia’s hottest city. Even with socialism setting political direction – as has been the case for a half-century – economic reforms carried out in recent years have brought Shanghai wads of foreign cash, setting cranes and concrete in motion in such a frenzy as to result in a metropolitan blend of Las Vegas and a George Orwell dream. The view of today’s Shanghai by the flim-flam men on the promenade, however, is much simpler: more foreign investment means more foreign suckers.

In his blue postal jacket and brown corduroy hat, the gray-whiskered Xie takes a seat on a concrete bench in a park just below the promenade. He kills time waiting for arriving tour buses by practicing his craft.

He starts by folding a small slip of paper in half. An edge is selected and he begins cutting both halves simultaneously with a small pair of scissors. His left thumb and index finger act as a pivot point as he carefully trims out the main curves of a human profile and its small details – nose, hairline, chin and lips. A paper display frame, decorated on both sides with colorful stripes and Chinese characters around the edges, is used to display the two resulting postage stamp-size pieces.

“Westerners are easier to cut because they have more prominent features compared to Asians,” explains the 19-year veteran cutter after producing a sample piece complete with a large chin and pompadour.

Xie’s primary target is the Japanese tourist. Though he has never been to Japan, he speaks nearly fluent Japanese, a skill he learned from listening to a feed from Japanese pubic broadcaster NHK.

“I speak Japanese and feel comfortable talking the price up to 100 yuan with them (the Japanese),” he says of his negotiating. “But for Europeans or Americans I take what I can get, maybe 10 yuan.”

The merchandise dealers are less particular, chasing nearly anyone who looks willing to relieve his wallet of 50 or 100 yuan for, say, a Chairman Mao special, which, as Xie informs, is supplied to the peddlers by 10 to 12 outlets around Shanghai for 15 yuan.

Xie claims that there were times a few years ago when the traders – which today number around 100 on any given day – primarily sold small stone carvings but later switched when they realized it is easier to swindle tourists with phony watches, Mont Blanc pens, and Louis Vuitton wallets.

The selling of these wares has technically become illegal, Xie notes, with fines and jail time resulting for transgressors caught in the act. And indeed, the occasional wail of a policeman’s siren causes all the hawkers to scatter. Xie, however, never even flinches. “This is art,” he boasts of his work.

Xie’s arrival in the park is usually by mid-morning, soon after his duties of driving a postal truck are finished. He then starts studying the arriving tour buses; Korean, Taiwanese, and European tour groups are easily identifiable with a mere glance. He even can tell which buses are arriving from Beijing – useful information since he knows that such travelers will have already become weary of salesmen like him.

Xie learned by watching. His apprenticeship came at the hands of two other Bund cutters; he peered over their shoulders as they worked.

On an average day Xie will take in 200 yuan, quite a nice sum considering his monthly wage from the post office amounts to only 1,400 yuan. Given that statistics from the Shanghai Municipal Tourism Administrative Commission show that yearly Japanese tourist visits through July of this year increased by sixty-six percent over the year before, it is no surprise to hear Xie say that his business is doing better than just a few years ago.

The reason for the tourist boom is because Shanghai is booming; it is nearly one giant construction dig. Cranes and scaffolding are now as common as stir-fried noodles. The results give Shanghai a unique character.

The view from Shanghai’s centrally located People’s Square park reveals surrounding buildings showcasing wedges, arcs, half cylinders, suspended spheres, and rising spires. At night, colorful lighting puts the architectural puzzles on display as bicycles, taxis, motorbikes fight for traveling space on the narrow streets below.

“That used to be farmland ten years ago,” says Xie, pointing through the city’s daytime haze at the disco ball-adorned Oriental Pearl Tower, whose surrounding high-rise apartment buildings are now receiving their finishing touches. Soon the world’s tallest building, the 95-story Shanghai World Financial Center, will rise nearby.

The boom, though, hasn’t been completely smooth. Reports of tenement housing and slums being demolished by local officials without consent of the residents are common.

“Everyone had a better life 20 years ago,” maintains Xie, who has his Chairman Mao lapel pin (one symbol of the Cultural Revolution of the ’60s and ’70s) fastened to the underside of his hat. He notes that he has seen an increase in family fighting and divorces over money in recent years. “Only a small number of people are benefiting from what is happening today.”

While Shanghai continues upward – 2,000 additional buildings over 18 stories are now in the works – Xie’s goals are a little less lofty. In addition to abandoning his scissors in favor carefully ripping the profile shapes with the tips of his fingers (a technique he feels he can master inside of one year), Xie plans on expanding his language skills.

“I want to practice English so I can get 50 yuan out of the Western tourists,” he laughs.

Note: This article originally appeared in November 2004 on the Sake-Drenched Postcards Web page.

Teachers, professors, farmers, engineers, students and skilled artisans were murdered. Entire populations of cities were either starved or forced out from their homes into collective farms.

Those who were deemed to be in opposition, or considered as posing a potential threat, to the Khmer Rouge Government (or Angkar) were brought to Tuol Sleng (also known as S-21, or “Security Office 21″), a former high school converted to a prison, in Phnom Penh. Here, amid what can only be described as pure madness, 14,000 prisoners were interrogated, tortured, beaten, and “exterminated.”

Over the years since, the crimes of the Khmer Rouge during the Cambodian Genocide went mostly undocumented. Today, Tuol Sleng is a museum dedicated to those that might have otherwise been forgotten.

For prisoners at Tuol Sleng, a typical day consisted of nothing short of sheer horror and the strict adherence to ten rules…

1. You must answer accordingly to my questions. Do not turn them away.

There are four main buildings (A, B, C, and D) set in approximately a horseshoe shape around an open central yard of grass and trees. Only the first floors of all the buildings are open for viewing.

A large iron fence, topped with barbed wire, surrounds the entire 600-meter by 400-meter compound. Landmine victims ask for change at the gated entrance off Street 113, bordering the property.

2. Do not try to hide the facts by making pretexts of this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me.

The first floor of Building A has ten open cells (formerly classrooms) extending down a hallway that runs at the edge of the greenery. In the hallway, the walls are a washed mix of deteriorating white and gray concrete.

3. Do not be a fool for you are a chap who dares to thwart the revolution.

In each room, five three-foot iron bars, used for shackling prisoners, extend vertically from the alternating yellow and red tile floor near the entrance. Their ends are hooked at the top. The entrance door is wood and the windows have iron bars running horizontally and vertically. A single bed frame sits in the middle of the room. Various clamps and other steel implements, used in the torture and shackling procedure, rest on the bed. A large black and white photo displaying the torture of a prisoner hangs on the wall. A rusted US Army ammo box sits next to the implements, apparently used for their storage.

4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.

Building B sits next to Building A and forms a right angle in the coutyard. At this junction there is a large wooden structure sits at the edge of the grass. It is composed of two vertical columns and one horizontal beam. The beam hangs roughly ten feet off the ground. Three eyelets, separated proportionately, hang down from the beam. A large cracked clay pot sits at its edge.

As depicted in a painting by Tuol Sleng survivor (one of the few) Vann Nath, selected prisoners were hoisted up through the eyelets with rope, turned upside down, and dunked headfirst into the clay pot – at the time filled with water – as a means of interrogation.

5. Do not tell me either about your immoralities or the revolution.

Building B houses a series of rooms. The majority of which feature photos of some of the prisoners: Cambodians, Vietnamese, Thais, Laotians, New Zealanders, Americans, men, women, and children. They are mostly front and side view mug shots. They are numbered and dated. Some necks have chains around them. Some hands look to be tucked behind backs. Some women hold babies. Some men and boys wear berets. All look very sad.

6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.

Number 108 is a man with protruding eyes. Number 408 is a scared young girl. Number 275 is a gray-haired old woman. Number 189 is a man who is missing one of his arms. Number 66 is a man exhibiting a strong jaw but a very emaciated upper body. Numbers 12 and 17 are young boys.

7. Do nothing. Sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do nothing. You must do it right away without protesting.

In the last room, shackling irons sit behind a glass case. Photos of the disposal areas for the bodies hang on the walls. In them, skulls line up in a field like melons at a market. Bones fill burial pits like kindling before the lighting of a fire. A concrete bust of Pol Pot sits chained to the floor. It was sculpted by one of the prisoners.

8. Do not make pretexts about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.

Building C and Building B sit next to each other, end to end. An information sign indicates that on the third floor “the braid of barbed wires prevents the desperate victims from committing suicide.”

A labyrinth of brick walls forms makeshift cells all along the bottom floor. Chains are attached to the individual cell floors. The horizontal dimensions of the cells are perhaps twice as big the inside of a chimney.

9. If you do not follow all the above rules, you shall get many lashes of electric wire.

Building D forms a right angle with Building C to complete the horseshoe shape around the courtyard. Inside are actual torture devices. More paintings by Vann Nath hang above many devices to give a visual description of their grisly use.

Some procedures involved: shackling a prisoner facedown in a coffin-like container filled to the brim with water, suspending a prisoner from the ceiling with rope and dunking him headfirst into a barrel of water, and pinning a prisoner to the floor while chemicals are poured over one of his immobilized hands gripped in a wrench.

10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

In the final room, skulls of former prisoners form a chalkboard-sized map of Cambodia. It is mounted on the wall and is the prominent feature of the room, and perhaps all of Tuol Sleng itself. The Mekong River flows in red between the skulls through the length of the country.

Note: Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is located at Street 113, Boeng Keng Kang 3, Chamkar Morn, Phnom Penh. Admission is $3. This article originally appeared in December 2001 on the Sake-Drenched Postcards Web page.

The lush, jungle-covered landscape of Papua New Guinea’s Milne Bay Province, which includes strings of islands and the south-eastern section of the mainland, provides many options.

Canoe styles vary, with each region having a very distinct shape or decorative pattern – perhaps something akin to a trademark. But no matter the type, the construction procedure generally gets a little complicated after that initial selection.

“Then you have to remove the fairies, the good ones and the bad ones,” says the chairman of this month’s 3rd annual Alotau Canoe Festival. “You will do this by singing to them, asking them to go from your tree to another.”

While he speaks, Kaniku’s troops – many of whom are dressed in gray jumpsuits and culled from a local prison – are busy assembling the stalls and platforms on the festival grounds in the province’s coastal city of Alotau. Saws, paint brushes, and coffee mugs fill out the chairman’s work table.

“The singing is a ceremony,” says the graying 58-year-old, pulling a ruffled strip of newspaper from his pocket and tearing off a small section, “that will remove the fairies, or spirits. Before you cut down the tree, there’s a ceremony. After you cut it down, shape it, pull it to the village, and decorate it, there will be ceremonies.”

He pauses and plops a pinch of tobacco into the piece of newsprint and rolls it.

“Always,” Kaniku adds, “keep the women away during the decorating because the men will be naked.”

The final products of these rituals will be set in motion during the first weekend of November, a bustling three days of races, traditional food, and dancing to the rhythms of skin drums. But Kaniku sees the spectacle in a broader sense: it is an opportunity to educate the nation’s youth about a traditional art form and simultaneously showcase the area in a positive sense, one that can be seen as a tourist destination.

The roughly 70 canoes will arrive at the grounds on the edge of glassy Sanderson Bay in full splendor, ready to be raced across its mouth and back.

The Wala Sailau canoe sports a deck and hails from the chain of islands that make up the Louisiade Archipelago to the south. Known for their large, tarpaulin sails, these dugouts use small keels for cruising in shallow waters and outriggers to ensure stability.

Also unfurling a sail is the non-decked Rabaraba Kukakuka. This grand, yacht-type vessel measures approximately 50 feet in length and originates from Goodenough Bay, north of Alotau.

The Kula Ring canoe is known for its colorful patterns adorning its bow and the trade it has traditionally undertaken in polished red shells and pigs within the D’Entrecasteaux Islands, which are just outside the next bay north from Alotau.

Canoes are not an anachronism in PNG. In addition to providing transportation between islands, they still function as a key means in the trade of copra (desiccated coconut), cocoa, and marine products.

Because canoe construction requires so many rituals, which includes a one-month fast on the part of the paddlers just prior to the craft’s launch, the entire process could take 6 months. The nuts-and-bolts carving and decorating, however, might span a mere 3 weeks.

Such dedication, Kaniku says, is fleeting among young people today. Not only is he eager to reinstitute the art of canoe building, but he would like people to get in touch with where they came from.

“All of the canoes,” he says, “somehow contain the image of the womb.” This might include something like a figurehead carving of a woman on the bow.

The Tawala war canoe, originating from many of the villages within Milne Bay itself, is simpler than the others, relying solely on the strength of its more than 20 paddlers for forward motion.

They are the crowd favorites. The hulls are embellished in cartoon-like aviary and marine imagery, with the rim perhaps lined with feathers.

For hundreds of years, war canoes were key elements in tribal fighting that often included ritual cannibalism – a practice that gave PNG an international reputation that Kaniku hopes to dispel.

“Cannibalism is associated with war,” he argues. “Otherwise people don’t go just killing for the sake of protein. It is a ritual.”

Cannibalism was seen as a way of shielding a warrior from a dead enemy’s spirit and subsequently harnessing that power for the warrior’s own emboldening.

Though cannibal activities are documented in PNG well into the last century, the arrival of Christian missionaries in the 19th century is generally credited with substantially reducing the practice.

But in September, a British Tory party spokesman, Boris Johnson, apologized for the contents of an article he wrote for The Daily Telegraph.

“For 10 years,” he wrote, “we in the Tory party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing, and so it is with a happy amazement that we watch as the madness engulfs the Labour Party.”

Kaniku is frustrated that word of past rituals still lingers today.

“Even Papua New Guineans,” he says, “boast of their fathers eating human flesh, but that is just pride. When you go to question them, they don’t know when and where.”

Kaniku would like people to recognize the value of their culture. He thinks that a festival in which people can proactively participate will be a means of interfacing culture with tourism, with each supporting the other.

Between 2001 and 2005, PNG averaged slightly more than 50,000 tourist arrivals – one-tenth that of Fiji and half that of New Caledonia and Samoa.

Those who do enter PNG are likely to be headed to one of its bucolic coastlines for diving or venturing into the mountains to visit former World War II battlegrounds. (While the Kokoda Trail, where Japanese troops waged a vicious campaign against Australian and New Guinean troops, is perhaps the most famous site, the area around Alotau saw Allied troops turn away Japanese advances in two key battles.)

PNG’s general lack of law and order, little modern tourist infrastructure, and single international point of entry (at the capital Port Moresby) are major tourist drawbacks. Kaniku, however, remains unbowed; he believes that PNG can be a true experience for the ambitious traveler.

“We want tourists to come to the villages,” he explains. “We want tourists to go see the real Milne Bay.”

With the Milne Bay Tourism Bureau and the National Cultural Commission as support, the festival allows a peek into village life.

As paddlers, in grass skirts and colorful face paint, approach the festival grounds in the return leg of the races, they chant as they head to the shore. Any bad spirits loitering in the area are held in check through a welcoming of vegetables and fruit bestowed by their families and friends.

Kaniku, a Fulbright scholar who graduated from the University of Mississippi, is an author and former instructor at the University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby.

He resigned his post in the mid-’80s after he concluded that the university’s curriculum did not contain what he thought was the real history of PNG.

Now working on a number of books, including one on canoes and another on culture, Kaniku respects the spiritual element within canoe construction, but feels that spirituality in certain ways has become overly intertwined within everyday life.

“The village people believe in witchcraft,” he says, placing another rolled newspaper smoke between his darkened teeth. “We are born into that belief. Any sickness, we blame on witchcraft. Any success or failure we credit to witchcraft. People have to open their mind.”

“Tears Shouldn’t Be,” a theater play written by Kaniku, tackles the subject head on. It is the story of an Alotau girl who travels to Port Moresby and contracts HIV while working as a prostitute.

Kaniku hopes that the Christianity-themed play, which was performed a single time, is able to teach responsibility.

Rather than magic, Kaniku is a firm believer in getting in touch with the soul within the canoe.

“It is our association with the land,” he says. “The tree is a child of mother earth.”

Note: This article originally appeared in November 2006 on the Sake-Drenched Postcards Web page.

Caretaker James Kuk says that there is usually one reason why people visit Bomana, a nineteen-kilometer drive outside of Papua New Guinea’s capital Port Moresby.

“Most tourists,” says the groundskeeper, “want to come here before going to the Kokoda Trail. Travelers will be asked by relatives in Australia to get a photo of a certain friend or family member’s grave.”

The battles of World War II in PNG pitted Australian and New Guinean troops against the invading Japanese. Japan’s landing on the mainland in 1942 began along its north coast, the opposite side of the strategically important capital of Port Moresby. The steep grades of the Owen Stanley Mountains that lie between the two formed what is known as the Kokoda Trail.

Bomana is the final resting place for many of those Australian soldiers who prevented the Japanese from marching over the treacherous ascents and through the mud and thick forests of the trail to Port Moresby.

Quiet and tranquil, Bomana offers a pleasant respite from the dusty and noise-filled streets of nearby Port Moresby. But for returning veterans, the grounds can bring back bitter memories of brutality.

Australian veteran John McKay, 82, who served in Z Special Unit in World War II, visited Bomana during a return trip to PNG in 1963.

“I was looking for a particular friend of mine, John French, who won the Victoria Cross,” said McKay at a recent Remembrance Day ceremony in Brisbane, Australia. “He came from Crow’s Nest in Queensland. I wanted to get a photo of his grave.”

The Victoria Cross, the highest commendation awarded to British and Commonwealth forces, is presented to those who have shown great bravery in the face of tremendous danger on the battlefield.

This distinction has made French’s plot one of the most popular at Bomana, says Kuk, one of the cemetery’s 11 groundskeepers.

A member of the 2/9 Infantry Battalion, French was killed in the PNG’s coastal city of Alotau in 1942. During a charge against three Japanese machine gun posts, which the 28-year-old was able to subdue with a pair of hand grenades and a sub-machine gun, French received severe injuries, causing him to collapse in front of the third post – where he died.

Like the rest of Bomana’s graves, which are arranged according to nationality in three blocks of rows, French’s place of burial includes a rectangular marker with the location and date of his death etched into the face. Native plants in yellows, purples, and reds fill out the bare earth around the stone.

Special messages from relatives are sometimes included. “His duty nobly done for those he loved,” reads the stone of C.C.P. Nye, who served in the 2/14 Infantry Battalion and died on September 8, 1942 at the age of 25.

McKay entered the military in his late teens. In PNG, he served between the eastern mainland’s Milne Bay area and the northern islands of New Britain.

“We carried out special operations behind enemy lines,” he remembered at ANZAC Square just prior to a ceremony to honor Australia’s veterans. “It was mostly surveillance and demolition.”

Wearing a green beret and crisp blue jacket adorned in shiny medals, McKay had harsh recollections of his PNG tour.

“I think they did some shocking things,” he said of the Japanese, “like cutting flesh off our fellas who were wounded. I’d never forgive them for that, frankly.”

The Office of Australian War Graves oversees the resting place of over 20,000 graves across the Pacific for the men and women who served in Commonwealth countries during the World Wars I and II. Of the 3,779 honored at Bomana, the age of death ranges from 16 to 69.

Last year Bomana, which receives between 200 and 300 visitors a day, saw thirteen additions. On September 18, 1945, a Douglas Dakota transport plane originating from the island of Morotai, a former Japanese airbase, plowed into an isolated mountainside at an elevation of 14,100 feet. The wreckage was first discovered in 1970. But because of the difficulty in ascending the peak, the recovery required three missions, the last of which took place in June 2005.

In August of that year, a full military ceremony honored the loss of the 19 servicemen onboard. Among them is Marie Craig, Bomana’s lone female. One of the thirteen graves is communal, collecting the unidentifiable remains of 7 who perished that day.

On a hill behind the cemetery is a circular arrangement of 10 stone columns to honor 770 unfound soldiers. From this perch, all the white stones in the field below come into view.

Despite the impact that the war still holds to this day, McKay is not convinced that it was all worthwhile.

“There was never a victory really,” he said of World War II. “So many lives lost. We didn’t gain all that much I don’t think. I lost a brother in a bombing raid over in Germany. I don’t think his death proved anything. He was just one of many who were killed.”

Note: This article originally appeared in November 2006 on the Sake-Drenched Postcards Web page.

The Hollywood photographer’s assignment from the US Navy was to photograph the Allied prisoners of war as they were being released just prior to Japan’s surrender.

With his Rolleiflex 75mm, Swope walked through rubble and burned-out structures and befriended Japanese both young and old alike during his three-week tour at the end of August 1945.

The resulting collection of portraits and a letter written to his wife, both now on display at the UCLA Hammer Museum (A Letter from: The Photographs of John Swope), not only express the physical and emotional difficulties experienced by the soldiers while in prison but also send the message that war has tremendous impacts on individuals on both sides of the fighting.

“Whether one is the ‘victor’ or the ‘defeated’ everyone is touched by war, and nothing is black and white,” explains exhibit curator Carolyn Peter of the message of Swope’s work. “Everyone, the Japanese, the Americans, the Chinese, is affected by the political decisions and actions of governments.”

Swope’s portraits of the Allied soldiers are close-ups of stubbly men, some with cigarette packs in shirt pockets, others wearing caps and white scarves. Though usually a bit gaunt, they all have smiles.

Perhaps the photograph capturing the feeling of liberation the best is that of a group of a few dozen men gathering on a rickety pier of logs outside a camp in southern Tokyo’s Omori district. Swope took the photo as the men, hoisting Allied flags and wearing not much more than underwear bottoms, stood packed together and waved in jubilation at Swope’s oncoming boat.

At the same time, Swope chose to go beyond the plight of the POWs to photograph Japanese people and show how they were struggling to live since the war’s conclusion.

Swope witnessed the bombed ruins of a Mitsubishi airplane factory. Burned fuselages, wings, and other bits of twisted metal are seen strewn about the floor.

He paused at a torched car, snapping a photo as a man peddled his bicycle past bits of scattered concrete chunks.

A young boy, whose pants were cinched by a piece of rope looped around his neck, had tied a beetle to a string. Swope shot the photo as the boy held the beetle near his nose.

The letter to his wife, actress Dorothy McGuire, further explains how the Japanese were attempting to adjust to the firebombing.

After visiting the flattened and charred landscape of Hamamatsu, a coastal city between Tokyo and Nagoya, Swope wrote, “It’s very strange and odd to go ashore each day and come face to face with very worst ravages of war – the complete destruction of the years and years of planning, effort, money and human sweat of the people of Japan, together with the human wreckage represented [by] the liberated PWs – and then to return to the ship each night and to suddenly be transported a million miles away from the horror of daytime.”

His writing also shows how his assumed image of the Japanese had been changed.

“But I know now that I was wrong about one thing,” Swope wrote. “I had anticipated a much more hostile and even violent greeting to the Americans. I have neither seen [nor] heard of any such attitude. They have buried their feelings to the point of complete subservience, and evidently at the word of their Emperor they have bowed to their new leaders.”

Swope made his name filming Hollywood celebrities in the 1930s. Other shots included in the show are those of Stewart, Henry Fonda and Joan Crawford.

In presenting Swope’s work, Peter’s biggest challenge was in narrowing down the images and the letter quotes that complemented them.

“I tried to pick images,” she says, “that showed the range of Swope’s subjects and themes such as prisoners of war; Japanese guards, civilians, and children; the devastated landscape; and the idyllic landscape, and to balance that with the physical limitations of the galleries.”

The current war in Iraq, Peter says, makes these photos just as relevant today as they were then.

“After seeing the devastation and hearing the horrific stories of what people had experienced during World War II,” she says, “Swope and others hoped that humanity would never have to go through this again. Here we are sixty years later clearly not having learned some of the lessons we should have learned.”

Note: This article originally appeared in March 2006 on the Sake-Drenched Postcards Web page.

The first head of cattle enters the steel chamber. The stun-gun operator attempts to position the silver pistol-like instrument between the eyes of the jostling animal. Then…

Wham! It drops to the floor, hooves clanking against the sides.

Quickly, workers in white smocks stained in bright red attach a chain to its leg. The animal is hoisted up and then along a steel rail.

As one of the workers draws a thin, foot-long blade from his belt to slice the animal’s throat, the next head arrives inside the walled enclosure. An echoing moo then begins rolling through the slaughterhouse.

“The overall concept is this,” explains Janette James, general manager of Port Vila’s beef processor Vanuatu Abatoirs Limited (VAL-Pacific), “What does Vanuatu have? We have tourism, kava, timber…and beef. It is one of the main export earners.”

Not only that, this Pacific Island nation has organic beef – an increasingly desirable commodity on the international market, one that this former joint colony of England and France hopes to exploit if it can only procure more cattle.

Between 8,000 and 9,000 head of cattle are processed annually at VAL, with two thirds being for the local market and the rest for export. Australia, the Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea are typical overseas destinations.

Farms on Efate or those on the outer islands, primarily Santo or Malapula, fatten the cattle on local flora. With year-round rain and a volcanic landscape, Vanuatu’s soil is arable and nitrogen-rich – a combination that produces grasses which are long all year.

“The cattle,” explains James, “are not eating down at the ground level, where the parasites are. Cats, dogs, goats, and pigs all have parasites. They eat closer to the earth. Our grass is so lush generally. The cattle are nibbling the nice green bits off the top.”

Grain feed is not used, which renders the likelihood of BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) occurring to be fairly remote.

“You couldn’t say it is impossible,” James cautions, “because anyone who says something is impossible is asking for a problem.”

This lack of diseases is one reason annual exports of chilled and aged frozen beef increased by 11% for the year ending 2005, says a report issued by the Vanuatu Quarantine and Inspection Services. Japan, which imported 34% more than the year before, has suffered from multiple cases of BSE in recent years.

Beef exports accounted for 6.5% of Vanuatu’s total for 2002.

James sees the international markets, especially that for organic beef, as the future.

“Organic branding in developed markets like the European Union,” says Dr. Dale Hamilton, acting director of Vanuatu Quarantine and Inspection Services, “is seen as providing added value to beef.”

Organic beef is that which has been raised in an environment free of hormone injections and chemical pesticides. But only “organically certified” beef can qualify as organic beef.

One third of VAL’s exports are organic. Each month one container (approximately 75 head of cattle) is shipped to Australia, where VAL has organic certification. The processor hopes to get organic certification in New Zealand in the near future.

VAL ships its organic products at an average premium of 20% over non-organic. Though James is quick to point out that the percentage can be higher for top cuts, such as tenderloin and rump.

Expansion into international markets, however, has its problems. For one, VAL is a service abatoir (slaughtering facility) for the local butchers, with whom preference is placed. This was the basic tenet at the entity’s founding in 1974.

“If the butchers,” supposes James, “want to put through 80 animals, which is our capacity based on the space available in our chillers, we can’t kill any for export.”

But that is an issue only if cattle exist for export. Often the farmers can’t keep up with the market demand.

“We are having periods,” she says, “where during a whole week we are killing for the local butchers. We haven’t got a situation where we have cattle available just to have the staff busy.”

The cattle arrive at VAL the day before, whereby their insides are cleaned out – “Elimination before being eliminated,” James says. The first “knock” comes the following morning at 7am.

“I do feel a bit squeamish,” admits James, “when I look into the animal’s eyes before its slaughtered. But my job is to make sure it’s done efficiently and quickly and causes the least pain and trauma to the animal.”

Any stress inflicted before killing, she emphasizes, is going to show up in the quality of the meat. “We are going to end up with non-tender meat.”

Once killed, the animal’s head and hide are removed with knives and rotating handsaws. Workers, whose typical injuries amount to cut hands, advance the animal down an assembly line of hooks and hoses that proceeds over a slick, blood-splattered floor.

At the end of the procession is a computer developed by Triton Commercial Systems. As machinery hums, high-pressure hoses hiss, and fans rotate overhead, a worker attaches a barcode tag from the computer to each processed carcass.

Guaranteeing organic certification is vital to shipping organic beef. The tags allow for tracking of each piece of beef as it moves from the slaughterhouse to the customer. In days past, the beef was marked by hand.

Though James refers to the business as having a “cowboy environment” due to the tactics employed by the butchers – for example, demanding lower kill fees or showing up at VAL with their cattle unannounced – the native New Zealander takes pride in Vanuatu beef. A sign on her office wall claims Vanuatu beef is “the best in the world.”

When cooked, the beef appears a bit stringy and has a unique taste, certainly a bit more gamey than other cuts.

“It is a drug,” James says. “I have it once every two weeks. It is addictive. You long to eat it.”

This article originally appeared in August 2006 on the Sake-Drenched Postcards Web page.

But in recent years there has been a disappearance of one particular crab from the market’s tables. Looking like a blue alien creature bound tightly in twine, the coconut crab was once as common as the grilled fish being fanned by ladies in flower dresses.

The culprit: a dish of curry sauce, a couple spoonfuls of coconut milk, and a few slices of toast.

“It is a delicacy,” says Jason Raubani, a representative of the management division of Vanuatu’s Fisheries Department. “We have a good tourism industry here, and coconut crabs are one of the big attractions that brings people to spend money in Vanuatu.”

As a result of a rapid decline in numbers of the crustacean – many of which found their way onto dinner plates in restaurants in Port Vila – the Fisheries Department implemented a partial ban on the collection of the world’s largest terrestrial crab. It is a move that the department hopes will rejuvenate a resource that has become a symbol of the nation.

The collection of the coconut crab, which can weigh nearly 9 pounds and live 60 years, is prohibited for the three years through 2007 in Sanma Province, the location of Vanuatu’s second largest city of Luganville.

This came about following a recommendation included in a report issued in May 2003 by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research that summarized a survey of crab stocks.

The report was a followup to a survey from 10 years prior that gave rise to annual quotas and closed collection periods for the provinces of Sanma and Torba.

“In Torba Province,” Raubani says of the region which includes Vanuatu’s northernmost Banks and Torres islands, “collecting crabs is one of the few ways in which people can get an income. Management and sustainability of this resource is vital.”

The crabs spend most of the daylight hours within the protection provided by hollow areas in tree stumps or rock crevices. At night, the omnivores, whose two powerful front claws can literally cut into a coconut, scavenge for fruit or small animals.

“The local landowners are the collectors,” says Raubani. “They sell them to wholesalers who in turn ship them to the hotels and restaurants of either Luganville or Port Vila.”

Collectors bait paths with chunks of fruit. Armed with flashlights, they can easily gather the crabs emerging from their holes to seek food.

Allan Palmer, a lifelong resident of Vanuatu and manager of a gaming club, recalls seeing crabs in great numbers on Port Vila’s island of Efate. “In the evenings,” he says, “I would see them dashing across the road as I drove up into the hills.”

Today there are most likely none.

He noticed that the crab population started to dwindle on Efate just after Vanuatu’s independence in 1980 from joint French and British rule. He remembers that being the time when the population started to really increase and people started adapting to modern civilization. “Collecting the crabs in large quantities just became easier with cars,” he says.

Given that the condition of the stocks had actually gotten worse in Sanma in the intervening years between reports, the 2003 report recommended the outright ban that is now in place. (A limit of 2,000 crabs with a closed season from October to April for Sanma had been set following the previous report.)

The 2003 report cites poaching, for which there is a fine of up to 100,000 vatu (roughly 923 U.S. dollars), as a prime factor in the poor performance. The report stated, “the general effectiveness of the management in this region has been low.”

Since the results of the measures for Torba – which included a restricted season between August and November and an annual quota of 5,000 crabs – in the 2003 report were said to be “moderate to high,” further recommendations were not made.

Though its shell color can vary from red to blue, the coconut crab can be found scaling trees and picking at dead rats in the island regions north of Australia and between the southern Pacific and Indian oceans.

Taking steps to ensure their preservation has been an issue in Vanuatu since the early 1980s. A fisheries act aimed at protecting females of egg-bearing age prohibits the collection of any crab whose carapace (roughly the length of its torso) is less than 9 cm.

Legal crabs in Vanuatu can still be obtained from places like Penama Province, where the famous land divers test their manhood by leaping with a single vine tied to their ankle from wood structures built high up into the air.

At the restaurant at the Sunset Bungalows resort in Port Vila, a crab meal cooked up with curry sauce and coconut milk is still available for 3,600 vatu (or 33 dollars).

In the local Bislama tongue, Palmer says, the phrase “big bol” – a reference to the bowl-like shape of the crab’s abdomen – is often used in markets when inquiring about the size of available crabs.

After the crab has been sufficiently “bled” (whereby it is cracked in the head with a knife with its internal fluids being allowed to drain out to remove any bitterness) it is boiled to a bright red. The chef will then mix the curry sauce and coconut milk inside the crab’s abdomen to form a pate that can be spread over toast.

French people, however, says waitress Mary Florina Tiano at the Sunset Bungalows, “just want it boiled and served with lettuce, vegetables, and mayonnaise on the side.”

With the Vanuatu government being preoccupied with accepting international aid and providing tax-free banking havens, reports from international aid agencies have shown that health and eduction in the outer islands have not improved from their low levels since independence.

Raubani hopes the coconut crab, shown raising its massive claws on the nation’s 20-vatu coin, will not be similarly neglected and remain alongside the nation’s live volcanoes and lush jungles as a point of great pride.

“After 2007,” he says, “there will probably be another survey to see if there is a need to extend that ban. But we hope that in the past three years the number of crabs has been rejuvenated. It will depend on whether the management in Sanma has been implemented effectively.”

This article originally appeared in August 2006 on the Sake-Drenched Postcards Web page.